


We're Gonna Need A Bigger Boat

by Kozakura_dono



Category: Bleach
Genre: Bad Decisions, Blood, Bullies, Realistic Violence, Unrealistic violence, Wounds, actions have consequences, school gangs
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-23
Updated: 2018-09-14
Packaged: 2019-01-21 17:16:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 8,925
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12462291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kozakura_dono/pseuds/Kozakura_dono
Summary: Ichigo's head was always destined to be a bit more crowded than normal.  It just never occured to me that I might be plucked from my life and dropped into his body at an utterly random point in his life. Self-insert.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started writing this a few years ago, and like all of my other works, this is not done and may never be done. It's kind of fun though and I think some people might like it, so I'm posting it.

I blinked.  Immediately, something was off off off, and I squeezed my eyes back shut, hissing even the sensation wasn’t really pain.  It was just very wrong, as though my eyes were a tablet screen someone had wiped clean and then proceeded to fuck around with the usual brightness and display settings.

As I shifted in confusion and discomfort, some other vague wrongness began to grate at me, and finally, I gritted my teeth and snapped my eyes open.  Automatically, my hand shot out to the side to reach for my glasses, and it was at that precise moment I noticed three things in rapid succession.

One.  My nightstand was nowhere to be found.  Right next to my bed sat a compact, metal desk.

Two.  Everything I saw was clear and bright, with a strange, high up quality to them.  I'm blind as a bat without my glasses or contacts and astigmatic as hell, and I could tell immediately from the lack of itchiness or coldness on my face that I was wearing neither.

Three.  My hands were not my hands.

It's three that was the most jarring.

I'm a calm person, and surprises don't normally sway my mood one way or another.  This though?  This made me jump.  Or, to be more accurate, it made my heart start beating in a way that probably wasn’t healthy and almost made me throw up.

Slowly, as though they would change had I moved them too quickly, I brought those unfamiliar hands to my face even though I could see them perfectly clearly without doing so.  It was just reflex, I guess.

They were long.  And skinny.  The color was all off, far too peachy to be mine.  The nails were short and bluntly clipped, almost down to the quick.  There were strange, thick calluses on the knuckles instead of on the thumb, where I like to worry the skin.

All of this was downright alien for me to see.  My fingers are stubby, and my knuckles aren't prominent at all.  My nails are long and often painted.  These were not my hands.

As my eyes traveled, they were quickly stopped yet again.  My forearms were skinny, and I could see corded muscle beneath the skin.  They were sparsely covered in light, wispy little hairs.

Now I felt sick.  It wasn't just the hands.  Probably not just the arms either.  I was too scared to look in the mirror because at that point, I already knew the foregone conclusion.

This was not my bed.  This was not my room.  This was not my body.

Clearly, I had eaten something or drank something off last night.  Fuck it.  I went back to sleep.  
0-0-0

"GooooooOOOOD MORNING, ICHIGO!" My eyes flew open at the very unfamiliar, accented, male voice.

My dad has the habit of barging into my room and rudely stealing my covers if I make the mistake of waking up after him, so my natural inclination to roll away didn't feel amiss at all to my sleepy brain until my arms, still long, skinny, and the wrong color, braced my body onto the floor in a different way than normal and my legs slid into a slippery battle stance.  Without thinking, I propelled forward, my leg extended.  The man flew back, hard, straight through the open window.

My body fell out of the ready stance on its own, and I stood there for a second, horrified.  Did I just....  The window, I could still see out of it, I was on the second floor, at least 10, 20 feet up.  There's no way that guy wasn't seriously injured if not dead.  Holy Hell.

Well.  That would be self-defense no matter what, right?  Even if he was dead.  'Strange man breaks and enters 16-year-old girl's room, killed in ensuing struggle'.  I wasn't in the wrong.

Still made me feel sick though.  I felt light headed and ill.  I also really, really needed to pee.

I thought to myself as I padded through the hall.  Paranoia started to tinge my thoughts as I took in the light, smooth wood flooring, and the well-lit hallway leading to other rooms.

Had I been drugged?  Was I in the middle of a psychotic break?  Even walking felt weird, like my center of gravity was up, not to mention the whole vision thing.  The legs carrying me weren't even right.  They looked like long, spindly sticks.

I peeked in two doors before I finally found a bathroom, noting that one of the rooms I passed seemed to be a bedroom, maybe for a young girl and boy, if I was judging the clothing and small mattresses correctly.  What in the world?....

No matter.  I was going to pee, and then, I was going to leave.

I shut the door behind me, wadding up the little mat and some hand towels to firmly wedge the door closed because there wasn't a damned lock.  I ignored the rest of my surroundings, which turned out to be pretty stupid of me.

There was no toilet.  Just a very deep tub and a shower.  I scowled, the expression feeling strange.  There was, however, a vanity with a bright, clean mirror.

I hesitated.  I already knew intellectually that I wasn't going to see my reflection.  Still, the thought of seeing a face that wasn't mine as my reflection was a very strange sort of horror.

I'm no stranger to dissociation.  Sometimes days, weeks, even months will pass by and suddenly, I'll leave a haze, experiencing brief periods of clarity.  I'll make the connections that the person I see in the mirror is me, that is how everyone I know and interact with perceive me, and then I'll be reminded of the fact that people are people.  With their own thoughts and emotions and skills and motives and lives that aren't mine.

The fact is, though I'm always disconcerted when I realize once again that my existence is seen solely through interactions of my fleshy shell, it's always the same bodily manifestation that I come back to.  Seeing something else is going to scare the shit out of me.

Well, I'd rather pick the time for this battle myself.  I walked forward, still too high, with an unfamiliar stride, and right away, I started categorizing the differences, before I was even fully in front of the mirror.

Thin.  Orange hair?  Brown eyes.  Long, narrow nose.  Small, mean little mouth with thin lips.  It was pretty much the exact opposite of my own face, which, considering what I'd already observed of the rest of this body, wasn’t all that much of a surprise.

Then, finally, a different sort of shock dawns on me.  I wasn’t just skinny.  My chest was flat and I had no hips to speak of.  I looked at least two inches taller than my true height of 5'4, maybe even three.

A clinical voice filed that under the explanations category of my brain.  That's why my walk felt strange.  Shifted center of gravity.  That was why my legs felt so spindly and everything looked higher up than usual.  All of that extra height was in my legs.

Incredulously, I stuck a hand down the front of unfamiliar sweatpants, distantly noting the odd feel of prominent hip bones and a super defined stomach.  I hesitantly reached under what felt like boxers and screeched as I feel something soft, dangly, and extremely alien, drawing my hand away as if burned.  Oh my god, was it standing up?  WHAT THE HELL?!?!

I managed not to collapse or break out into complete hysterics.  I shoved that issue to the back of my mind.  I still really, really needed to pee. 

I tore out the wadded up out towel with surprising ease.  These skinny arms weren't weak, though to me, they seemed too thin to have much muscle.  Then again, this body seemed to be entirely made of bone and lean, whipcord muscle the more I moved and the more of it I saw.

I crept down the hallway, listening for any signs of another person.  That first guy had been fucking insane.  Even if he recognized me, what sort of person tried to wake another up via attack that way?  It hadn't been playful, either.  This body seemed to understand that and had taken appropriate measures to remove the threat.

After a little more thorough searching, I found where the toilet was located.  It was in its own separate little room very close to the bathroom.  I had mistakenly assumed that it was simply a linen closet.

There was a bit of soul crushing horror after I actually found the toilet that I will never speak of.  All I'll say is that prior to that day, I had never touched a non-toddler's nether regions and the incident was scarring and awkward in the extreme.

How did guys deal with this?  This ugly, flappy, vulnerable thing?  It didn't even feel like a real body part to me!  My brain was of course picking up signals that something was there, but 16 years spent in a female body meant that my mind couldn't accept that this, this appendage was my genitalia. 

I was a few steps away from the abyss of hysteria, I could tell.  The strange man, this body, holy fucking Jesus this body, everything was wrong.  What really pushed me over the edge though, was a clear, high voice calling a name from downstairs.

"Ichigo!  Come down and eat!  It's almost 8, and you don't want to be late for your first day of school!" Ichigo.  Fucking Ichigo.  The orange hair, the strange man, the odd layout of this house-

Kurosaki fucking Ichigo.  That was my working theory.  At least, it was after I snuck back into his room, shrugging a purple t-shirt over my head and pulling on a baggy pair of jeans.  I frantically tore the room apart, looking for some sort of bag.  I found a Japanese style backpack, the kind that looked like a brief case in miniature, filled with empty notebooks and stationary.  I unceremoniously dumped all of that out, stuffing a few shirts, pants, and underwear into the little bag. 

On the desk chair next to the bed, a black uniform lay pressed with crisp edges, not a wrinkle in sight.  I let it lay there.   Just as I was about to leave the room, I frowned at the empty notebooks.

I strode over to the haphazard mess, picking up a notebook and quickly tearing a clean sheet out.  I picked up a pen and paused.

How the fuck was I going to write a note?  I knew maybe 100 words total in the language, and that was spoken vocabulary at that.  I didn't know any hiragana, katakana, or kanji. 

But then, I had understood the voice downstairs, hadn't I?  And in all probability, she wasn't speaking any English or Spanish.  Those were the only two languages I understood.

Fuck it.  Nothing here was making any sense anyway.  Who the fuck cared if anyone could read this?

'Gone.  Will be back.' And fucking miraculously, the words came out in symbols that I could now decipher easily.  Well, easily in that they were half -recognizable.  My shitty handwriting seemed to have crossed over from my real body to this one.

That was good enough.  I slung the overstuffed bag over my shoulder and made a beeline for the stairway.  Then, I swooped into the kitchen, completely ignoring the small child currently frying something on the stove, and grabbed an entire serving bowl of plain white rice and a neatly wrapped bento.  Before she could turn around and notice me, I left the kitchen and then the house as silently ad possible.  I didn't even pause to put my shoes on, simply holding them as a sprinted down the street, following the road's sharp angles and allowing them to take me as far from that house as possible.

It was really clean.  There weren't broken beer bottles on the ground and few used cigarettes.  No used condoms at all.  When I finally paused to make sure I hadn't been followed and to get my shoes on, the socks  I'd woken up wearing proved to be enough protection between me and the pavement.  Where I was from, taking a step without proper foot protection was a surefire way to get a horrific infection and maybe tetanus and or AIDS, depending what your skin has the misfortune of coming in contact with.

I began running again, enjoying the way these muscles could work without making me feel like I was dying.  I could breathe easily, despite outright sprinting for at least 10 minutes.  The more I ran, the more children I saw uniforms.  I got some strange looks, probably because despite the height, I had a scowling baby face, but whatever.  When I got to a river, I finally stopped running, only then beginning to feel the burning of fatigue up my legs.

I sat down on the embankment with my bag and bento propped up next to me.  I took the lid off the big serving bowl and inhaled the fresh scent of still warm, plain white rice.  Good god what I wouldn't do for some beans.

I unwrapped the bento, looking for utensils of any kind.  I really didn't want to eat with my hands.  That sort of thing made me feel like a damned barbarian and I was already dirty, having not taken advantage of the shower when I had the opportunity.

I found a pair of chopsticks.  Did I know how to use chopsticks?  No.  Not at all.  However, something was better than just my hands so I made do. 

They were pretty unwieldy at first, and I couldn't get nearly as much food as I wanted to into my mouth.  Still, over the course of maybe 30 minutes, I ate around a cup and a half of rice or so, quelling my hunger, so I considered it a win.

The world seemed very peaceful by that river.  I covered up the rice again.  Now that I thought about it, I probably should have eaten whatever was in the bento first.  Meat or fish would spoil more quickly than rice.

I must have sat by the river for hours, just thinking.  The conclusions I came to weren't exactly heartening.

Theory one.  I was hallucinating all of this.  I guess it was possible.  I doubted it, but I also doubted there was a manual written for this precise set of circumstances, so the exact explanation was anybody's guess.

Theory two.  This was all a dream.  Kind of like the hallucination theory only with less psychological implications.  I also doubted it.  I've been different people in dreams before, true, but in my past dreams, I never question that fact.

Theory three.  This was happening.  This was reality.  It terrified me. 

I really, really didn’t want to do it, but hoping this was all some by product of a fractured mind was too optimistic for me.  I decided that this was the explanation I was going to go with until proven otherwise.

I was suddenly Ichigo fucking Kurosaki, and if that uniform was any indicator, I was a middle a middle school student.  The thought made me cringe.  I had already done my time in junior high already.  I didn’t deserve to be forced to go back and repeat it again!

That, I thought as I watched a rough looking man in a worn outfit begin to linger by the river, was actually not the greatest of my problems.  The man had a hole in his chest, and along with that, a medium length chain.  Fuck.

Well, as long as the ghosts minded their own business and I minded mine, we would be fine, at least for a little while.  It had been years since I'd last really watched Bleach, but I knew once Ichigo hit high school, the shit hit the fan and he wasn't able to stay out of the resulting messes.

I'm not a nice person.  Ichigo's family was not my family and feed and clothe me as they might, I would not be beholden to them the same way Ichigo was in the anime.  I wanted nothing to do with the afterlife or ghosts. 

All of that 'protector' nonsense could be foisted on someone else's shoulders.  I wasn't game for Soul Society's nonsense or any Shinigami involvement.

Even at that moment though, I was probably being observed by either Aizen or Urahara.  I was under no illusion that I could outsmart either of them by pretending to be Ichigo because I was sure they had planned for every contingency in that case.

I was going to be me.  Only, quietly.  I would have to put on some sort of act to not arouse too much suspicion at first, especially after this stunt, but I needed to do something the real Ichigo would never do in a million years.

I would think on that.  For a while, all I would do was stretch my legs, literally and figuratively, to acclimate to these strange circumstances.

0-0-0-0-0

Ichigo's body was fun, and I mean that in the most unsexual way possible.  He was strong and flexible and capable of all sorts of parkour shit I had only ever seen on YouTube.  I spent the rest of that morning and all afternoon just running around, giddy at the fact that I wasn't even winded and doing various flips and spins that naturally transitioned to karate moves.

The body knew what to do even if I didn't.  That would serve me well, I thought.  If I was correct, the after school special thugs who liked to fuck with Ichigo because of his hair color would probably show up very soon.  The sun was steadily sinking into the horizon, the orange and pink sky prettily reflected in the river.

I twisted the body this way and that, already warmed up but unwilling to risk getting my ass beat over something like a cramp.  As I stretched, listened, a light breeze carrying the sound of passing cars and traffic, but much more faintly, snickers and overly loud laughing.  I grinned.

Back when I was younger, when people didn't call the cops and I couldn't be charged as an adult, I used to provoke older kids frequently enough that I would get into a scrap or two every month.  It was fun because I was huge as a kid, so even if they wanted to, most of the boys I messed with physically couldn't do anything to stop me.  I was also, on average, 3-5 years younger than them.  No sixth grade boy wants to be known as the guy who hits the local asshole second grade girl.

This would be different.  This body, while strong, wasn't big, the trait which had been my real advantage back all those years ago when I did fight.  Also, my opponents had no reason to hold back.

I was probably going to regret this later, but I couldn't make myself feel nervous at all during that moment.  I felt vaguely excited, but most of my emotions had been spent earlier at the Kurosaki household.  I cracked my knuckles and my spine.

The laughing got louder as they approached and I could tell that they would soon be within eyeshot.  I sunk into a deeply shadowed portion of the bridge, doing my best to not touch the absolutely filthy sofa not 3 feet from my body.  I shuddered.

They appeared in a small mob, about 6 guys total.  I sneered as I looked at them.

Crusty ass dreadlocks and cornrows as well as bleached hair seemed to be in style, if these clowns were anything go judge by.  Their jewelry was mostly fake, but the tall, old looking one in the middle, who I suspected to be the leader, had a thick rope of genuine looking gold carelessly slung across his skinny throat.

As if he could feel my gaze, Gold Chain focused his gaze with surprising severity outward toward my position.  Show time.

I stepped out of the shadows and tried my hardest not to grin.  They looked stupid and eager for a fight already, which was understandable to me.  I wanted to fight too.

"I thought we warned you last time, Ichigo-chan," he sneered, emphasizing each syllable of that name as though that was going to make me angry.  No.  What made me angry was the fact that he was obviously blesses with hair that could be silky and straight if he put enough effort into it and he chose to put them in dreads, and not the hot, well-maintained either, but the sort he had obviously put in at a whim and then left to rot.  I couldn't stand people who did those types of things to their hair.  Fucking barbarians.

"Your hair is offensive to me," I called, smiling gently though I could practically feel the envy making me eyes green.  Fucking assholes.  Why the fuck go through the trouble of putting in dreads if he wasn't willing to maintain it?  It wasn't like he could just hit up any old African hair salon either because Japan didn't happen to have those in abundance, and the few places that would do that service were very expensive for a middle school kid's budget.

And by the way.  My fucking voice.  Oh my god.  Ohhhhh my god.  I was fucking Masakazu Morita but younger and that was so badass that I almost squealed, only it would Morita's voice squealing and....Holy Jesus.

"Excuse me?!" he demanded incredulously.  He shook his head then, making those poor, nasty dreads whip back and forth.  The more I looked at him the more I wanted to scalp.  People who abused their hair didn't deserve any hair at all.

"That's enough stalling.  Let's go!" And with that, the fight was on.

I threw myself, literally laughed my body outward, in an echo of my earlier acrobatics, immediately sweeping one spindly leg down with enough force to get my target down.  He flew downward like a wanted, but as I came down, someone grabbed my shirt and threw me.

Things got...bad from there.  Before I could really react, I was hit twice in the face.  Ichigo had a crazy iron chin though, because despite the whiplash in my neck and the generalized feeling of pain on my fucking eyeballs, I didn't feel like passing out.  Kind of made me want to cry, but instead, I laughed and let the body do what it wanted to do and wiggled out of the hold in a decidedly sophisticated manner, contorting myself till I slid out.

From there, eyes and face hurting, I bounded away and picked up a rock.  Then I threw it.  That was a mistake.

So, I guess Ichigo tended to control the fights he got in as a kid because in the anime, there wasn't nearly so much blood and Ichigo didn't end up collapsed in a broken pile, but hey.  I hadn't lost. 

Both of my eyes hurt and they felt crusty as hell.  They were going to be swollen shut by morning, I was sure.  I tried to bring my bloody fingers up to touch them and yelped aloud.  Fury made me stagger over to Gold Chain, who was curled up and quietly whimpering on the ground.  He curled into himself at my approach.  I grinned and a nasty glob of my bloody spit came dribbling through my teeth.  I spat it out, and at least some of it ended up on his nasty uniform.  I couldn't really tell though.

My hands were all bloody and scraped, and the knuckles even a little swollen, which was surprising.  Considering how often the anime portrayed Ichigo fighting, I would have figured his hands were used to all sorts of abuse, but I guess not.

I grabbed him gently by the dreads, internally weeping at how parched and sad they felt.  What a horrific waste of hair on such an undeserving little pissant.

I stared down clinically at the wasted strands, knowing in my heart that there was only one course that could save them.

"Listen closely, asshole.  You go to the supermarket before you go home tonight and you look for some goddamned coconut oil.  Then, you heat that shit up and you hydrate your poor dreads."

He stared at me stupidly, which made my blood feel like it was boiling.  I snarled, bringing him closer to my face.

"I CAN SMELL THE FUCKING VASELINE IN YOUR HAIR!  DON'T FUCKING DO THAT!"  I was screaming, almost incoherently.  It didn't matter.

"You throw out all the damned Vaseline you have, and you go out and buy some coconut oil and olive oil or you put those damned dreads out of their misery and shave your head bald.  If I see your dreads like this again, I'll stalk you til I find out where you live and fucking scalp you in your sleep."

His eyes were comically wide and he did look very slow, so I lifted him up higher and stared him straight in the eyes.

"I hate people who take their hair for granted.  Despise them.  Don't be that person.  It won't end well for you.". I dropped him and he fell like a sack of potatoes.

I went to retrieve my bag and my food.  Now that I knew my eyes were going to swell shut within the next couple of hours, I really didn't want to be homeless for the night.  Who knew what sorts of deviants this place attracted at night of these filthy middle school rejects liked to prowl by day? 

As I left the bridge behind me, following the road, I came to a realization.

I had no clue how the hell to get back to Ichigo's house.  Shit.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> wow hi it's been a while. i decided to update this because my roommate won't stop crying and i miss shark week and i'm not adjusting to university life very well.

Yeah, I didn't have a single clue how to get back. As per usual, I just wandered around until I found a good place to sit, and then I ate my feelings.

I decided to eat the bento, which was a very good decision. My dad always says that you can taste when food is made with love, and I have to agree. Yuzu's cooking was as good as my grandma's, though radically different in just about every way. It was comforting to see that love, even if misplaced, was universal.

I was very hungry and emotionally exhausted, so I didn't taste the food all that much and I didn't pay close attention to what I was eating. I made the chopsticks work for me by simply stabbing the food through, which I was pretty sure was considered unlucky. It didn't matter.

The place I'd settled down had turned out to be a park. I began to reevaluate my decision to go home. 

For one, I hadn't passed a park on my way under the bridge. I hadn't even been aiming for the bridge. I'd just ended up there. I was completely lost, and I didn't even have an address to return to. If someone gave me street names, I would still be completely lost because my navigation skills couldn't see me out of a paper bag in a place I did know, much less a different country.

It was warm enough that sleeping outside wouldn't kill me. It was actually pretty balmy, so it would be comfortable.

On the other hand....camping. Bugs. Animals? Were there lots of animals in Japan? This area was awfully forested...what if there were foxes? Or raccoons? Or skunks? Lord. Skunks. Nope, and I had food too, I would probably get sprayed to hell and back.

I still didn't know how to get to the Kurosaki house and I could feel my vision becoming more limited as the minutes ticked by.

I just got up and started walking. The darkness and my own lack of vision were making it quite hard to navigate, so I tried to find areas where there were more street lamps.

That was a good decision. I hadn't been thinking before, but convenience stores in Japan were open 24/7. There would be people with an obligation to politely point me to a bathroom and answer my questions. God. Super polite cashiers in the middle of what was looking more and more like a small city. How strange.

It wasn't long before I found a big convenience store. There were more after school rejects on the front steps, only they looked like sixth graders so they scuttled away quietly without directing a single word at me. Heh.

Fun thing about being a badass looking guy, by the way. People didn't feel the need to look all up and down your face and body like you were public property. That weird appendage between my legs didn't seem to be so bad after all, though I feared for the next time I needed to pee.

"Keep this safe for me," I ordered, pushing my big container of rice at a mousey haired cashier and smiling winningly. A teeny bit of blood oozed out of my mouth, probably ruining my intended effect.

I didn't give her the chance to say no as I quickly ducked behind an aisle, searching for a bathroom. Ah. Mission accomplished.

It was empty and clean, with a decent sized sink. I mourned the fact that I had no money and couldn't buy any conditioner or shampoo but made do with jamming my head under the gushing stream and manually picking out flakes of dried blood and debris. Then I did the same for the rest of my body, quickly shucking off the soiled garments and putting on a spare set. I felt much better after that, like less of a savage, even though my eyes were black and my hair could be so much better and I was still a guy and I think I had lost a tooth earlier and it was hanging on by a fleshy thread that wouldn't stop bleeding.

Horrible. And my ass felt weird because every time I sat down, there was no meat to cushion my bones. This situation was so fucked up. 

I brought a wad or toilet paper up to my face, dabbing at saline as it ran down my face. I tried to make it stop, but I just couldn't, and then, to make everything worse, my nose started running and getting clogged and ugly, pathetic noises started coming out of my mouth.

My ass was flat and I had a penis and I missed my brother and my dogs. I wanted to go home and forget any of this had ever happened, wipe that undeserving bastard's face and abused dreads out my head forever. I wanted my dorky, annoyingly airy and breathy voice back, occasional lisp and uncool accent and all. I just wanted my life back.

When I finally managed to calm myself down and stop those hideous, gut wrenching sobs, I looked in the mirror. Jesus. Ichigo was not an attractive crier. His face turned patchy and red, and his nose ran like no one's business.

I looked like a mess, but at least all the blood was off. My mouth still bled and my face felt like literal hell as it burned, but with everyone else's blood washed off, I felt human. I left the bathroom.

Only there were no less than three workers waiting outside the door, and one looked as though he had previously had his ear pressed up against it. I smirked. That is why you always leave a bathroom abruptly and aggressively. It lets you know who the weirdos are straight away, every single time.

"Good job," I congratulated sincerely as I took my rice from the mousy haired girl's hands. She was mute and so was everyone else as I exited the store. I wanted to keep them from telling me only paying customers could use the bathroom and my tactic had succeeded.

It was still hard to see outside and it was only when I was a solid ten minutes away from the convenience stores that I realized I hadn't asked for directions and I still didn't know where I was going.

"Shitting Christ," I murmured, but I was unsatisfied with how quiet my voice sounded. 

"Shitting Christ. Shitting Christ! SHITTING CHRIST!" I roared, my hands clenching my serving bowl so hard my fingers ached and the minuscule little wounds reopened and started bleeding again.

Crying and screaming and who knew what the fuck next. I was gonna fall apart and it hadn't even been a day yet. Christ. What time was it? What day was it? What was the damned year?

I breathed inward and outward, only wanting scream incoherently, unable to move. My muscles felt like they were locked together so tightly they hurt, threatening to spasm and send a dozen Charlie horses up and down my feet, legs, and even my arms.

There had been kids. Kids with no cellphones. And it was warm. Holy hell. No cellphones. Or maybe....I tried to scramble through my memories. I hadn't been paying very close attention.

Some cellphones. No smartphones. Some kids had actually been talking into them, a rare right where I'm from. So...early 2000's? That was when Bleach started, wasn't it? And that black uniform...it wasn't the uniform Ichigo wore in the anime, I already knew that, so that meant he was somewhere between 7th and 9th grade. The body was already tall and lanky, so if I had to hazard a guess, I would say at least 8th grade but maybe 9th.

And the time...well, the sun had gone down maybe two and a half hours ago, and Japanese school students seemed to stay really late most of the time, so maybe....8? Or 9? Not ten yet. I breathed out.

I needed a real shower and I needed to wash and condition my hair til the world made sense. 

My eyes were reduced to little slits by that point. I could barely see anything. I was nowhere near a good place to sit, not even a park bench, so I just tried to stay on the sidewalk. The pavement was nice and even, so I didn't have to watch my step, and Ichigo's body was blessed with a good sense of balance. 

I wandered around until my eyes swelled shut almost entirely. I would have stopped sooner, but I would rather pass out on a bench than in an alley. I could be a bum, but I would be a bum with standards. Just because the streets were clean didn't mean that there weren't questionable stains and piss and vomit splattered in the alleys.

Besides, hopefully, I would get spotted by a police officer or something and they could take me home. Lord knows I didn't know how the fuck to get back. 

I curled up the bench, putting my bag under my head and my rice under the seat and fell asleep before I knew it.

0-0-0-0

"K-K-Kurosaki-san!?" I tried to open my eyes and flew into a quick panic when all I got was pain and darkness. I sat up but my forehead smacked right into whoever had spoken.

"What do you want?" I demanded, though that probably wasn't the right thing to ask and not the way I should have asked it. Ichigo's voice was lower and more threatening than mine and also a lot louder, I was quickly realizing that my regular, 'slightly annoyed' tone sounded homicidal. 

I rubbed my forehead, very carefully avoiding my eyes. "Wait," I called, as I heard footsteps scamper away. They stopped at my softer tone. Jesus. I felt like I was talking to my baby brother.

"I'm not mad. I just can't see you. Come back. Please?"

"Hai," it mumbled. I grinned in relief, but that hurt my face. 

The voice was meek and high, which meant it was either a shy young boy or maybe a preteen to a teenaged girl. I couldn't really tell.

"Hey? You there, Stranger-san? You have a name?" I continued speaking in that cotton soft, calming tone. I really wasn't trying to be patronizing, but it seemed like Ichigo's voice needed to be exaggerated to sound anywhere near calm or kind, without any hard, flinty bits. That was... difficult. I was used to the sort of quiet voice, soft voice where the only real indicator of my feelings was my words. Every little emotion I felt colored this voice and let it out into the real world.

"You probably don't remember me..." it trailed off shyly. For me, that wasn't a bad thing. A refresher on the less known characters of Bleach wouldn't be turned down.

"That's fine, Stranger-san. You haven't tried to brain me or choke me or violently ambush me, so I'm pretty sure I'll like you more than 99% of the people I've met today." Again I heard uncertain shuffling.

"Help a... a brother out?". Oh, my fucking Christ. Brother. Jesus, it was so weird, but Ichigo probably wasn't the sort to say help a bitch in need so I had to make do.

"Okay," s/he started shyly, like s/he still wasn't sure whether or not to trust me. I couldn't fault her/him for that. Thank God for kind people, because if the situation had been reversed, I might have called the police or something if I was feeling particularly charitable. I heard her/him gulp.

"I'm Inoue Orihime, if you, um, remember me...I, I know Arisawa Tatsuki...you probably know her better than me..."

Well then. No record of anything like this happening in the anime, but whatever. Ichigo hadn't ever run away either. The question was, how could I spin this so that it made sense? Did Ichigo still talk to Tasuki? Did they go to the same school? I knew Ichigo remembered her in the anime because he had seen her brother's body at the clinic, but I wasn't too sure about any other ensuing encounters they may have had.

"Ah. Inoue-kun. Yeah, I know who you are. Wanna help me?" Maybe I could get her to talk if she walked with me so I wouldn't sound like as much of a stranger in this body. I knew that Aizen, and by proxy, Urahara, were already watching, but maybe I could just blame everything on a psychotic break or a head injury if I was careful.

"Well...how can I help you?" I grinned.

That was how, maybe forty minutes later, I found myself on a thin but clean spare futon in a very warm apartment with bandaids over cuts I hadn't realized were there and a bag of ice over my eyes.

Inoue hadn't talked to me much while we walked. I think it might have been because I asked her to just lead me by the hand when after a minute or two of very quiet, squeaky instructions, I ran into three street signs and tripped over the curb into the street twice.

Had Inoue's crush started this early? I hadn't thought it would start until highschool. Unless her crush had been the dormant sort, where when not in close proximity to the person, the crush fades but returns with a vengeance when contact is again established.

"Hey, Inoue-kun, what grade are you in?" That was an icebreaker, right? Age would have worked too, but the school system in Japan was different.

"Ninth..." She answered me from another room, but her apartment wasn't too big so I could here her well enough.

Ninth grade. So I had a year, maybe less depending on where exactly in the school year we were. 

Well. Freshman year had been like, four years ago but it could have been a lot worse. I could have been a seventh grader again.

"Do you go to, um, Mashiba?" A quiet hai sounded from down the hall. I was glad I'd gotten the school name right.

"I think we may have different classes, though." I didn't think I'd ever met anyone over the age of eight say anything with so much shyness. I didn't think Orihime had been particularly shy in anime, but then again, the anime had been set after another year of Tatsuki's influence.

"Maybe," I mused aloud. I really didn't know how to get more information out of her without sounding unnatural.

My eyes still hurt and the stinging from various cuts was supremely uncomfortable. Maybe in the morning, Orihime would feel more comfortable and I wouldn't hurt so much.

Once again, I fell asleep.

-0-0-0-0

"Good morning, Kurosaki-san." It really wasn't.

"It's dark," I groaned into the futon, burying my face away from the source of noise. Orihime sighed.

"We have school today, Kurosaki-san." Uh. No. My eyes were probably still swollen shut. 

"I can't let you stay here during the day by yourself, Kurosaki-san, and it's Wednesday. We need to get to class." She was still very quiet but also very persistent. Ah. What was that deal she had with her relatives? I didn't remember the specifics, but I did know that she needed to maintain a very high class ranking to continue receiving their support. Meh. Sucked to be her, I guess.

As gingerly as I could, I rolled out of the futon. My eyes were shut, but when I chanced making the membranes move, I could once again see a sliver of the outside world. That was a marked improvement over the previous night's blindness.

With my newly restored sight, I saw that it wasn't quite light outside yet. A neon little clock showed it to be 6:45. Ugh. Orihime was still wearing pajamas. 

"Can I take a shower before I leave?" She flushed but hesitantly nodded, not looking at my face. She stood up and asked me to follow.

She quickly led me to a little bathroom, explained her shower's controls a little, and fled, giving me a towel as a parting gift and leaving me to it.

I did a rude thing. I stole some of her shampoo (a teeny tiny amount to account for the fact that my hair was 30000% shorter) and used a little bit of soap, too. I would have to apologize, but I really, truly felt filthy and just warm water was not enough to clean the dirt and blood from my body.

I rubbed at the skin till it shone pink in most areas with random splatters of red,yellow, green, blue, and violet bruises dispersed over the entirety of the body. With my hair included, I was a literal rainbow.

The bruises themselves weren't just strange because of their sheer variety, but because in my real body, I didn't have the sort of skin that bruised easily, if at all. Really, the only time my skin changed color was with acne and with the sun. I didn't even turn red when I exercised or with embarrassment. From the pronounced flush I could see on this body, presumably from the steaming water, that was yet another difference.

I did another rude thing when I managed to locate Orihime's conditioner. I scrubbed a bit more at my skin while I waited, slowly lowering the water temperature. The skin on this body was just so strange; Never mind the total lack of body fat, it flushed. Every bit of skin was stained a light pink, like a full body blush. Ichigo wasn't even pale! There was no reason he should have flushed so much!

I shut off the now-cooled water and stepped out, gingerly patting myself dry and taking final stock of my injuries. It was...bad. But nowhere near as bad as it could have been.

As an average person in the USA, with no martial arts or sports experience to my name, the pain was severely hindering, at least in my mind. Ichigo's body wanted to continue on like everything was normal, and to be honest, for the extent I was injured, the pain wasn't actually as bad as I thought it would be. I suspected it was because Ichigo was used to dealing with injuries, while I very much was not. 

As a result, I kept wincing and grimacing every time I touched a bruise or cut, even though it felt like the sort of pain I could bat away. It was the look of them more than the feel that was hindering individually, though when added all together, the dull throbs and stings were enough to make me want to just lay down and go back to sleep for another day or two till scabs formed and the bruises really started healing.

I put on the clothes from the previous night, figuring that since they were only from the night before, they were probably still clean. It irked me a little, though. I was thankful I'd thought to bring more underwear and socks than anything else.

I exited the comforting, warm and sticky humidity of the little bathroom to the also balmy but dry air outside. God. What month was it? April? Where the fuck was the air conditioning? It had to be at least 85 degrees!

I didn't see Inoue anywhere, and I already felt very, very bad about using her shampoo and conditioner without asking, so I went back to the room where the futon had been, only to find the futon gone. I didn't really know what to do, and with no phone or internet to keep me occupied, I decided to take inventory of what I had in my bag.

Three T-shirts, two purple and one black. One set of sweatpants. A pair of near-knee length shorts. Seven pairs of underwear (and wow, no need for bras or camisoles or anything). Six pairs of socks. And, at the door, one pair of slightly worn athletic sneakers. 

In theory, then, I had another 5 days before I absolutely needed to make contact with civilization again, but my food source, the remains of the white rice, would probably run out either at the end of the day or breakfast tomorrow. 

Inoue had a crush on me, though, right? Maybe she would be willing to make me a bento? And breakfast? With careful rationing and not eating my feelings again, I could last at least another extra day, maybe two if I managed to bum a lot of food off Orihime.

Then again...Orihime probably didn't have that much to give and swindling a 14-year-old was kind of messed up... So maybe just breakfast? I didn't know how to repay her for helping me anyhow, and I was aware that it was really presumptuous to want or expect more. Would it be polite or creepy to offer help in some way?

"Kurosaki-san, I made some food, if you're hungry." Good God she sounded so meek. Like a,a baby dear or something. How does anyone who's ever had to live alone and endure develop to be so quiet and shy? I sincerely hoped, for her sake, that the only reason she was so timid was because it was Ichigo/me, her supposed crush, that she was helping. Now that I thought about, that made more sense. From my understanding, Japanese culture was quite strange about letting people into your home, which I understood well enough, coming from a family where friends and guests were rarely invited over and never allowed to spend the night.

Plus, I kept forgetting that I wasn't a barely 5'4 girl with a soft, "trustworthy" face and the sort of non-hostile appearance that drew small children toward me in droves. Ichigo was tall and skinny, all hard lines and scowls, knuckles proudly bearing the scars and callouses of a rough and tumble life spent fist fighting. 

"Thanks, Inoue-san." Miss Inoue. Could I call her Inoue-chan without sounding like a totally creepy bastard? I sighed.

It would sound weird, but maybe I should just ask. It felt weird calling someone so formally. In any case, Miss Kurosaki. Yuck. Even worse, Mr. Kurosaki. Double yuck. Oh, my god. 

I followed the voice down the hall to a small kitchenette. Orihime, now dressed, sat at the table, already eating.

From years of reading fanfic and getting a sense of other people's head cannons, I had come to regard Orihime's diet as a strange and wondrous thing made of food combinations theoretically possible as a sources of sustenance but not really put into use by the general human population for fear of accidentally unleashing an unholy abomination akin to, if not outright, Cthulu.

"So what do you have?" I smiled blandly, knowing I would accept anything she deigned to give me. I smelled eggs. And sausage. And bananas.

"Ah, well, it's not a lot, but ummm...you can pick from what's on the table?" Her voice tilted upward because I was already there, taking the plate she had out already.

As I unabashedly inhaled warm, scrambled eggs mixed with something green and something else meaty, I realized that fandom's evaluation of Orihime's cooking was greatly exaggerated. It was not inedible and, in my opinion at least, it very good if not delicious. It could have been because I was expecting something weird, just by virtue of Japanese food's foreignness, that I thought it was pretty good.

It was warm and palpable, and it also quelled my anxiety a little bit. I stopped myself after a single serving though both my stomach and mind yearned for more. 

"Um. Itadakimasu?" I was probably supposed to say that before I started eating. Oh well. I filled up a small, whimsical cup with pastel little dinosaurs up with some sort of tea and chugged the steaming drink back like a shot.

It was good, but not coffee. I jolted. Oh, my god. Coffee. In a body not once used to taking roughly a gram of caffeine, a single caffeine pill would be enough to wake me up. Hell, depending on Ichigo's previous caffeine experience, a single cup of coffee might be enough! Or, maybe, this tea was enough to keep me awake and not jittery for the rest of the day!

Orihime just looked at me, staying silent, a distinctly confused expression present in her body language if not her face. Meh. I wasn't Ichigo. I wasn't Japanese. I wasn't fourteen. I wasn't even male. I didn't know how to act like Ichigo, as all I could really remember about his character was that he fought, was moody and damn-near bipolar, loved his sisters, and was a complete pushover when it came to shinigami, whether they deserved his aid in any form or not. I could do the bipolar part all by myself, but the rest...

So no, I wasn't Ichigo, and pretending to be would both flanderize him and drive me to undeserved homicide, so I wasn't even going to try.

Orihime slowly shifted from confused to tired and faraway. I understood. Girl had other things to think about, and it wasn't hard to understand why. Now that my focus was on her, I noticed her gently rubbing and prodding a nasty wring around her wrist that shone as purple as my own bruises. Not only was there a bruise but pronounced swelling as well.

So, I really didn't want to get involved but...that was a fellow teenage girl. A younger, fellow teenage girl. With a bruise on her wrist that looked like someone had grabbed her so hard that had sprained it before dragging her around.

That...was not on. Orihime was really sweet, right? And obviously generous. And also, now that I was really looking at her, quite petite and skinny. I mean, yeah, boobs, but otherwise, the girl was thin and waifish. She looked exactly as strong as the average, frail teenager, despite the black belt she may or may not have had in karate.

She didn't have any close family and I wasn't sure how close she was to Tatsuki yet. So that meant bullies.

"Hey, Inoue-san, would you mind if I walked you to school?"

Her face flamed but then, seeing where my gaze was, paled. It was all very dramatic and evidently, people who could morph colors at chameleon speed did exist.

"U-um, this is nothing, I promise! I'll be fine!" Annnnnd there it was! The resolve and long-suffering I was used to from anime Orihime! I smiled on the inside. It was pretty cool to see that strength in the flesh for the first time.

"Ehh? I don't know what that means! But I used your shampoo and conditioner this morning and I wanted to know if you could show me where you buy it! I really like it." Which wasn't even a lie because it smelled like mangoes and made Ichigo's hair feel clean but soft even though it still rose up in spikes. 

Orihime blinked and strangely, the blush returned though not in full force. Instead, she smiled. It was tentative, sure, but there was something distinctly vindictive there in the twist of her mouth.

"We'd better hurry then! I can show you the konbini I go to on the way to school, Kurosaki-san." I waved my hand.

"Call me Ichigo." And there was the blush again, with something like a sputter too. Maybe not then.

**Author's Note:**

> It always pissed me off how every other generic gang member villain is given dreadlocks, especially if they are high schoolers. Many hair textures have to be treated specifically when they are locked, and I doubt a 14-18 year old baby wangsta would care to take care of their hair correctly. Crusty motherfuckers, I bet. I can't stand it.


End file.
